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The Sounds of Summer A look back at the Pearl Street Basketball League BY ROGER CLEAVELAND Republican-American

When Waterbury's Darryl Parker took his basketball talents overseas to play professionally back in the late 1980s and early '90s, he brought with him a little hometown pride that expressed his passion for the sport.

During his basketball travels to Argentina, Brazil and Qatar, he took along a few "Swish is a Summer Sound" T-shirts from the Pearl Street Summer Basketball League. Often teammates fell in love with the sentiment of the league's catch phrase and talked Parker into parting with a couple of shirts.

One such teammate in Argentina was playing a basketball video game one day, and he called Parker into the room to see an interesting discovery. In the summer league version of the video game, one of the teams to select to play was the Pearl Street All-Stars.

"There was the Urban League which is in Washington D.C.," Parker said. "Then I think there was the L.A. Summer League and the Chicago Summer League. Those are major, major leagues where everybody went to hone their skills in the offseason. To have Pearl Street right there with them I realized, 'This thing was bigger than we ever knew at the time.'"

Long before the Greater Hartford Pro-Am brought it's elite basketball to Waterbury this summer, Pearl Street made an indelible mark throughout the state, and the Norttheast, as a refuge for at-risk kids, a valuable developmental league, a college recruiting venue and a source of incredible entertainment.

Hubie Williamson started the league in 1974 after he attended a meeting in downtown Waterbury to address the concerns of several angry parents.

"There was a woman there talking about the fact her son was arrested," Williamson said. "He got into a scuffle after school. It was black and white kids going after one another, and the way she told it, the cops told the white kids to go home and the black kids got arrested."

Williamson felt frustrated that he didn't have a solution. He left the meeting with a friend and drove around the city thinking. As he saw kids all over Waterbury shooting at basketball hoops or playing unorganized pickup games, the idea came to him that if he could organize games kids would have less time to get in trouble.

"The motivation was less about basketball and more about, 'How do we get all these kids off the streets?'," said Williamson. "So it started out with us trying to address the unrest, and as the years passed there were things we wanted to add to it."

Williamson is still adding things today. Pearl Street ceased operations in 2008 rather than compete for players with new summer basketball leagues or AAU teams. Instead of letting someone else operate Pearl Street and risk allowing the proud image to fade, he retired the league.

Since then, with his strong reputation for helping kids through sports still intact, he has formed the Youth Sports Initiative. Through his new venture, he hopes to broaden the platform for impacting children ages 12-14 by utilizing multiple sports as a means of creating opportunities and developing well-rounded individuals.

Certainly, Pearl Street's impact at its height was enormous and spread quickly. Beginning as a forum for high school boys, it soon expanded to include the Mini Phase for kids 12-and-under; Phase I for kids 15-and-under; and ultimately the unlimited as Phase III, which drew college and even pro players.

"Coming from Hartford, we grew up playing in Keney Park, and it was just full of legends," said former UConn player Norman Bailey, who also played professionally overseas. "But Hubie had great competition at Pearl Street, the best you could find in the state. At one point I think it was ranked in the top five in the country of Pro-Am summer basketball leagues along with places like the L.A. Pro Am and the Rucker Tournament in New York City."

Whether such a ranking was merely perception or reality, Pearl Street was a huge success. Williamson said that at its height of popularity in the late 1980s, the league had 76 teams one year. And during its 34 years of operation, he said Pearl Street served 53,000 players. The schedule became so hectic that Williamson expanded from 10 weeks to 13 and also went from five days per week to playing all seven.

They played outdoors on Orange Street, City Mills Park and Lakewood Park, before eventually moving indoors to Kennedy and the North End Rec. Center.

"In the city I would drive around in our van and all the kids would say, 'There is Pearl Street'," Williamson said. "I'd ask if they wanted to play in a league. If they said they didn't have enough money for a team I'd say 'Get a coach, and bring me $10 apiece to pay for your shirt.' The response was unbelievable."

It only took a few years before suburban teams wanted in. For $500, a team of 10 kids could play from June until August, and there wasn't any better competition around. Teams from other cities then started showing up, too.

"It allowed you to step out of your own element, your own environment in which you normally played, and it gave you a chance to see some of the other talent out in the state of Connecticut," said former Boston College star John Bagley. "Pearl Street offered kind of a similar urban feel to what we had in Bridgeport, but it also had a suburban mix to it that made it a fun, diverse league."

It served the players of Waterbury well. High school stars like Phil Lott and Dewey Stinson would play every day at Pearl Street's Columbia Blvd. courts, night and day as Williamson gave them permission to turn on the lights on their own.

But Lott said the league was more than just a personal playground. He said growing up watching guys like NBA star Darryl Dawkins play there inspired him. And he learned about team camaraderie as he got older.

"It was great for high school basketball," Lott said. "You knew your high school teammates better back then because you played all summer with them. When you are younger you are playing in the Mini Phase or Phase I. You couldn't wait to get to the high school level, and then once you got there you were playing teams from everywhere with all the big names. It was a who's who of all the people playing at the time."

Former UConn great Corny Thompson began playing at Pearl Street while in high school, bringing a team from Middletown to Waterbury. Then when he was at UConn, he continued coming.

"The biggest battle I ever had was with one of the 'Bruise Brothers', Rick Mahorn," Thompson said. "Oh my God, we had some battles up there."

Before Gampel Pavilion was built, college and pro players needed somewhere to go during the summer, and often it was Pearl Street. Among the more prominent players who played there were Deja Dennis, Bruce Johnson, Jim Abromaitis, Chuck Aleksinas, Charles Smith, Mike McKay, Michael Adams, Rodney Parker, Al Fredericks, Early Kelly, Rod Foster and Wes Matthews.

Players would recruit one another to show up, and once there Williamson would create competitive teams to put on a show for crowds of anywhere from 100 to 2,000 fans.

"Great competition and a lot of very intense basketball," Thompson said. "If you wanted to hone your skills, that was the place to go. I remember it fondly. We just went out and had fun."

Thompson said hearing the name Pearl Street brought back a lot of good memories and a sense of pride.

"We had a series against guys from New York," Thompson said. "New York always thought they were the hot shots and there was no way a team from Connecticut could beat them. At that time, there were a lot of good pros in Connecticut. They had guys like Scooter McCray, Rodney McCray, Albert King. We didn't allow them to say they were so much superior, because we went out and matched them or beat them."

In the end, Williamson did his part to beat unrest on the streets and in the parks by turning them into basketball playgrounds.

"We used basketball as a tool," Williamson said. "It was the tool to get after everybody. Once the game started up at Lakewood and at City Mills, that was the event. There could be crazy stuff going on at the Park and stuff like that, but once the lights came on and the games started, it was unbelievable how everyone stopped and put their attention to basketball."

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